Can a wood chuck chuck…?

What a great week here in St. Louis! We’ve been having a lot of member support this week. We found a new investigator named Nathan. We were talking about ways to find new investigators, and so we prayed and felt inspired to go to this street. After we arrived, we felt that we needed to knock on this certain house and found Nathan! He is such a stud. He is 19, just graduated (with me last year….), and we had a great talk about repentance and how feeling of guilt and shame can be washed away through repentance and the atonement of Jesus Christ. We set up a follow-up appointment later in the week, and invited our Bishop to come. Unfortunately I was on exchanges, however the lesson went really well!! He is willing to pray, read, and be baptized. He wasn’t able to come to church yesterday due to being out-of-town, but I know he will come the next week. He is so solid! The ward is so ready to just get involved! Nathan is a very open young man, and upfront with his feelings and who he is. Really excited!

We have not been able to meet with Jazmine this week. We are taking things slow because the missionaries have had time in the past with her of being too pushing. We invited her to church yesterday, thought she was coming, but called about 20 min into it and said she couldn’t make it. Hopefully next week!

This week has been filled with great and amazing experiences and also lots terrible experiences. But I’ve learned that it’s a choice to let the bad get into your life. To let it rule you. There is a hope and that is to keep moving forward, because Satan wants us to get caught up on bad things, get down on ourselves. That’s why I think repentance is so important in our lives, because if we make a mistake, we can repent and move forward. Yes, sometimes repentance takes time, that is okay, however, its incredible when we turn to God to keep moving forward. We can find a hope in Christ, because of his perfect character and life, that is an example for us. God doesn’t leave us alone, ever. We may choose to leave him, but he is always there, waiting for our return.

Pat is a recent convert in our ward, she is 63 and joined the church about 4 years ago. We started this week reading the Book of Mormon with her. She attends our Gospel Principles class on Sundays, and Tuesday night open discussions. We went over to read with her this last week, and we were reading, and then she started to tell us of the things she is going through, as we were talking about the doubt that Sariah had of her sons returning back from Jerusalem. We felt inspired to talk about repentance, and how she can move forward in her life. The spirit was truly guiding this lesson and I have a testimony that the Spirit can truly soften hearts and guide the conversation to what she really needed.

Thought: Knowledge vs. Wisdom

“In learning of Him, it could be argued that the Savior’s greatest teaching was not in a synagogue, nor at the temple, nor on a mount, but in the way He lived His life,” Elder Robbins said. “His life was His greatest sermon. We are in awe as we contemplate His perfect life and His attributes. And we could also say that the best evidence of our worship and adoration isn’t in a church pew, or by our bedside, or at the temple, as important as those forms of worship are, but in the way we live our lives.”